Tag Archives: remote

Anyone who follows my postings on either Twitter or LinkedIN will know I have been racking up the miles lately travelling all over Scotland for work. One of the benefits of working like this is that I am still able to support my clients remotely due to the way I have set up the business. My business can effectively be managed from either a tablet or smartphone when I am out and about so long as I have access to the internet.

Last week I had a roadtrip down to the lovely Dumfries and Galloway area to install some Cisco routers in Annan, Castle Douglas and Stranraer. I was down in this area back in May for my holiday and remembered that the mobile signal between Castle Douglas and Stranraer is shocking and 3G is a myth in this area rather than the norm. I was hoping that since May things might have improved a bit. Not a chance!!

The satnav on my phone went awol at one point due to the fact that the mobile signal strength was awful. This is not very helpful when you have no idea where the client is. I had 4 clients ring in that day with issues and I couldn’t remote in to any of their systems due to the fact that both my myfi (T-Mobile) and my phone (O2) had 2G at best. With no Starbucks, MacDonalds and the like in this area it was very hard to find free wifi. Thanks to Stuart Mains from Stirling IT for bailing me out and covering my remote works which in turn kept my clients happy.

The point is though we now have all these fancy devices that allow us to work “on the go” but they are effectively useless if you need internet to work and you can’t access it. This isn’t a problem in the big cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow where mobile signal strength is excellent (for the most part) but in places like the Highlands where it is sketchy at best this is a big problem. Unless 4G addresses this problem when it is eventually rolled out across the whole of the UK then mobile working for some people will stay as an urban myth rather than an everyday occurrence.

Do you work while “on the go” or are you stuck in the office? Let me know!!